According to Clint Eastwood, it is the best Western in the history of cinema: “It was the first Western film that surprised me”

Clint Eastwood is the greatest living Western star in film history. He has remained true to the genre in countless films such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Unforgiven, sometimes both in front of and behind the camera. His passion went back to his teenage years, as he told the American Film Institute. At the age of 12 or 13, he saw one of his absolute favorite films, the today rather unknown ride to Ox-Bow.Clint Eastwood loves an 81-year-old western with an unusual story

Ride to Ox-Bow was released in the USA in May 1943. The story revolves around the murder of a rancher whose cattle were stolen by unknown assailants. Gil Carter (Henry Fonda) comes to town with a cowboy colleague and sees how a vengeful troop thirsting to hang the potential thieves and murderers.

Check out Clint Eastwood’s memories of the ride to Ox-Bow here:

“It was the first western film that surprised me“, Our sister site quotes Espinof Eastwood from a conversation with film critic and historian Richard Schickel.

At first I thought the film was a standard western shooter. [Stattdessen erzählte er] a rather depressing story that had a big impact on me. It was about moral values, Violence from lynching to racism and pseudo-machismo to the father-son relationship. There were so many well thought out moments that I really appreciated as a child.

As Eastwood and Schickel analyze, William A. Wellman’s production was inexpensive but dramaturgically brilliant. To give sequences a special mood, he covered Henry Fonda’s eyes with a camera zoom or showed fight scenes in a deliberately sober manner.

If you want to see Clint Eastwood’s western tip, Unfortunately, there is only one way to do this. The film is currently not available to stream anywhere. However, Ride to Ox-Bow can be ordered as a Blu-ray on Amazon *.

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The 8 Western highlights presented on Netflix, Amazon, Disney+ and MUBI include both absolute classics and lesser-known insider tips. There is something for every genre fan: Our recommendations cover a full 55 years of Western history between 1964 and 2019.

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